Ian Dallas gave Eric Clapton a book — and Layla was born

He was a friend of Piaf, dated Vivien Leigh and starred in a legendary film before becoming Islamic scholar Abdalqadir as-Sufi.

Scotsman turned British Muslim Sufi leader Dr Abdalqadir as-Sufi (formerly Ian Dallas).

OBITUARY

Ian Dallas (aka Abdalqadir as-Sufi), actor, playwright, religious leader. Born: Ayr, Scotland, 1930; died, Cape Town, South Africa, August 1. Aged 90-91.

Scotland can be odd. Its national animal is a unicorn, a mythical creature most likely to be found colourfully portrayed on schoolgirls’ lunch boxes. Under Scotland’s 1872 Licensing Act, it remains an offence there to be drunk while in charge of a cow. And then there is Ian Dallas.

Dallas was born in Ayr, south of Glasgow, in 1930 to a landed highland family and educated at the Ayr Academy, Scotland’s oldest school. From that moment and until he was 37 it was an unpredictable life of chance and opportunity, navigating through the lives of others or sometimes bobbing in their wake. These people included Eric Clapton, Vivien Leigh, Albert Finney and Federico Fellini.

He studied at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he socialised with a purposely cool milieu of writers, actors and the emerging rock stars of the era who wished to be taken more seriously.

He wrote a play, The Masque of Summer, described by Billboard as “a fairly high-flown piece of poetic drama” and which premiered in Glasgow. It may even have been “a work of genius”; the Glaswegians disagreed.

But a second was produced by the BBC starring Peter Cushing and more followed. He then adapted Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (starring Sir Alan Bates) and Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (Diane Cilento) and produced a TV series based on Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre. In 1963, he somehow won the role of Maurice in Fellini’s odd, if acclaimed, masterpiece 8½. It won two Academy Awards and in a 2012 British Film Institute poll was rated the 10th greatest film of all time.

Throughout the 1960s, he travelled North Africa and the Med­iterranean, staying long enough in Fez, Morocco’s second largest city, to be converted to Islam, and became Abdalqadir as-Sufi. Back in London, he was still Ian and yet fully immersed in the teachings of Sufism where, it is said, you own nothing and nothing owns you.

After the break-up of Leigh’s marriage to Laurence Olivier, she was suffering from what was almost certainly depression. Dallas had been introduced to her: “I was later to learn with horror that Vivien Leigh was being forced to submit to electric shock treatment, the then unnecessary clinical solution to a shipwrecked marriage.” His publisher described Dallas as “enmeshed in a turbulent affair with Vivien Leigh”. He had also become a friend of French singer Edith Piaf. But it was the encounter with Eric Clapton that led to the most lasting legacy of these years.

The guitarist was in between bands; Cream had broken up and he was working with friends from the sessions that had recorded ­George Harrison’s post-Beatles album All Things Must Pass. Recording as Derek and The Dominos in Miami, Clapton teamed up with the young, doomed, American slide guitar genius Duane Allman to begin work on a song Clapton had written about his love for Harrison’s wife Patti Boyd.

Dallas, newly immersed in Sunni Islam texts, had given Clapton a copy of a 12th century poem written by Nizami Ganjavi and based on an ancient Arab tale, The Story of Layla and Majnun, in which Layla’s father forbids her marriage to Majnun (Arabic for crazy) and he goes mad. “Make the best of the situation, before I finally go insane,” Clapton sings on Layla, one of the most famous love songs ever written.

By the time it rode high on the charts around the world, Dallas was immersed in Islamic studies, and would remain so for the rest of his life. Sufism is often described as Islamic mysticism and Dallas sought to redirect it to an older, stricter system, forming the Murabitun World Movement for this purpose. He became involved in Islam’s furious and febrile internal fights, and developed an acute anti-Semitism while dismissing Western democracy as waning, and accusing Pope Benedict of blasphemy in a confused document that appears to suggest his ­effort to seek understanding between major religions was in some way perverted.

Dallas also became fixated by the Pope’s German heritage, confusing it with Nazism. Joseph Ratzinger was conscripted into the Hitler Youth at 14, as were all German boys.

The Ratzingers opposed the Nazis. But Dallas wrote for his Sufi followers that “the Pope both lived with approval in the Nazi ethos, and was himself a Nazi”.

But by then the former actor had lost the plot and was spreading his hate liberally in all directions.

“Our Muslim kingdom is of course the great victim of a capitalism which knows, unlike ourselves alas, that Islam is its unique his­torical enemy, the two earlier witnesses against it, Judaism and Christianity, having surrendered to its protocols.”